Sunday, October 30, 2016

"What If the Newspaper Industry Made A Colossal Mistake?"

The headline is from a link in the Stratechery essay, which only uses it as a take off point to explore far beyond that question into the greater questions posed by information technology.

From Stratechery, Oct. 19:

The IT Era and the Internet Revolution

I like to say that I write about media generally and journalism
specifically because the industry is a canary in the coal mine when it
comes to the impact of the Internet: text shifted from newsprint to the
web seamlessly, completely upending the industry’s business model along
the way.

Of course I have a vested interest in this shift: for better or worse
I, by virtue of making my living on Stratechery, am a member of the
media, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that my opinions aren’t
shaped by the fact I have a personal stake in the matter. Today, though,
and somewhat reluctantly, I am not just acknowledging my interests but
explicitly putting Stratechery forward as an example of just how
misguided the conventional wisdom is about the Internet’s long-term
impact on society, in ways that extend far beyond newspapers (but per my
point, let’s start there).

What if, in the mad dash two decades ago to repurpose and extend
editorial content onto the Web, editors and publishers made a colossal
business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars? What if
the industry should have stuck with its strengths — the print editions
where the vast majority of their readers still reside and where the
overwhelming majority of advertising and subscription revenue come from —
instead of chasing the online chimera?

That’s the contrarian conclusion I drew from a new paper written by
H. Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas and published
this summer in Journalism Practice. Buttressed by copious mounds of
data and a rigorous, sustained argument, the paper cracks open the
watchworks of the newspaper industry to make a convincing case that the
tech-heavy Web strategy pursued by most papers has been a bust. The key
to the newspaper future might reside in its past and not in smartphones,
iPads and VR. “Digital first,” the authors claim, has been a losing
proposition for most newspapers.

Shafer’s theory is that the online editions of newspapers is inferior
to print editions; ergo, people read them less. To buttress his point
Shafer cites statistics showing that most local residents don’t read
their local newspaper online.

The flaw in this reasoning should be obvious to any long-time Stratechery reader:
people in the pre-Internet era didn’t read local newspapers because
holding an unwieldy ink-staining piece of flimsy newsprint was
particularly enjoyable; people read local newspapers because it was the
only option. And, by extension, people don’t avoid local newspapers’
websites because the reading experience sucks — although that is true — they don’t even think to visit them because there are far better ways to occupy their finite attention.

Moreover, while some of those alternatives are distractions like
games or social networking, any given newspaper’s real competitors are
other newspapers and online-only news sites. When I was growing up in
Wisconsin I could get the Wisconsin State Journal in my mailbox or I
could go to a bookstore to buy the New York Times; it didn’t matter if
the latter was “better”, it was too inconvenient for most. Now, though,
the only inconvenience is tapping a different app. Of course most
readers don’t even bother to do that: they just click on whatever is in
their Facebook feed, interspersed with advertisements that are both more
targeted and more measurable than newspaper advertisements ever were.

The truth is there is no one to blame for the demise of newspapers —
not Google or Facebook, and not 1990s era publishers. The entire
linchpin of the newspaper business model was controlling distribution,
and when that linchpin was obliterated by the Internet it was inevitable
that the entire apparatus would collapse.

The IT Era
Make no mistake, this sucks for journalists in particular; newsroom employment has plummeted over the last decade:

Still, just for a moment set aside those disappearing jobs and look
at what happened from roughly 1985 to 2007: at a time when newspaper
revenue continued to grow jobs didn’t grow at all; naturally, newspaper companies were enjoying record profits.

What had happened was information technology: copy could be made on
computers, passed on to editors via local area networks, then laid out
digitally. It was a massive efficiency improvement over typewriters,
halftone negatives, and literal cutting-and-pasting:...MUCH MORE